Uganda

Bob Larson is the President of Reynolds Food Packaging, an industry leader in the production and sale of a full range of stock and custom products for the foodservice, supermarket, food processor and agricultural markets. He was also recently elected to the Board of Directors for Five Talents International, an organization that is fighting global poverty through microfinance and education.

Since 2009, Larson has supported Five Talents by fundraising and speaking on behalf of the organization in the Chicago area. In May of 2009, he traveled with Five Talents to Kenya and Uganda as part of a Business as Mission team, where he taught business skills seminars to entrepreneurs. I had the pleasure of traveling with Bob on that trip, and recently had the opportunity to catch up with him to talk about the high calling of his work and fighting poverty.

Certainly we didn’t fix the world’s problems in a two-week trip. But we did plant a seed.

A seed that we pray will bear great fruit in the months and years to come. They are seeds of hope and a future. It is a hope that can only come through love and nurturing. We stood beside them, sowed our minds and hearts into them, and let them know how much we believe in them.

We leave behind hundreds of people whose lives will never be the same because of the work that we’ve just done! And THAT my friend, was cause to celebrate!

As we worked through the day, our teaching had them breaking off into small groups for various projects. I was impressed by how well the people worked together through these projects. The people were innovative and developed amazing ideas that they could work out collaboratively.

Their sense of unity was special. There wasn’t anyone running around saying, “I’m going to take this idea myself and go get rich!” The people tended to think much more about how each of them could have a part in the overall plan. There seemed (to me) this sense that each person knew that the one sitting next to them needed the opportunity just as much as they did, and it would be unthinkable to leave them out of the chance at achieving a better life.

But with so many family members dying she took on the responsibility of raising not only her children (five, if I recall correctly), but also raising many of her nieces and nephews who would have been orphans without Auntie Monica’s help.

So for Monica, microfinance helped her to make some additional income with her small poultry farm so that she could raise these kids. She made money to feed them, and to send most of them to school. Sending them to school was important to her because she knew the impact that a good education would have in helping these kids succeed.

Her example of selflessness moved me pretty deeply. Everything in her life either had to do with losing the people that were close to her or providing for the children impacted by those losses.

I don’t know if she realizes it or not, but she taught me a lot that day.

Our first meeting for the day was at the Five Talents Uganda national office. The program here was set up a little different than the program in Kenya. In Uganda, the Five Talents organization actually functioned a little more like a lending organization and the provider of the funds for microloans.

The office was very different than what you would think of for a financial institution, but my Western mind was still adjusting to the way of life (and work) in Africa. I was tickled to find out that they worked very hard to set up a special conference room for us to meet in. Little did I know that this special arrangement would be a couple of desks and chairs squeezed into a garage. Like many other things in Africa, it worked for what we needed it to do…

Meeting us at the airport in Kampala were two people that I’ll never forget… Reverend Jonathan and our driver Chintu (pronounced kin-too). Not only was Chintu our driver, but he was the owner of the transport company that he represented. What I thought was really cool about him is that he was also someone who had benefited from the same microfinance work that we were there to support!

Africa was the last place April Young thought she’d ever visit. An executive with an international finance company that lends money to start-up companies, she was a philanthropist who preferred to stay safe at home.

Five Talents regularly sponsors “Business as Mission” trips to the places it’s working. For April, the trip to Uganda and war-torn Rwanda in 2004 was a chance to stretch her faith. “I remember standing on the tarmac in Uganda and praying, ‘Okay, God, you put me here. I’m asking you to be here for me.’ And he was.”

In May of 2009 I joined a team of businessmen from around the United States as Five Talents International sent us out for a Business as Mission Trip to Kenya and Uganda. FTI is a faith-based organization that fights poverty with microfinance. They work in areas where there is extreme poverty and help to provide small (micro-) loans to people to help them start businesses that help them pull themselves out of poverty.

This video is just a taste of some of the amazing praise and worship that I experienced with a couple hundred people in Uganda during my recent trip there. I love their energy and excitement to sign for their Lord! I still don’t understand the words at all, but I love the song…

I’ve been home from my mission trip to Kenya and Uganda for several days now, and I am still struggling to fully process everything that I’ve experienced over there.

So many memories. So many emotions. So many ideas. So many questions.